Life and death in the digital cage

Last Friday, an almost bright summer day in Manhattan, I strode through the charming street park, Broadway blocked off between Herald Square and 35th Street, where bustling New Yorkers could sit and read in metal chairs or spread their newspapers, bagels and coffee out on little tables, or just meditate or chat with old friends. But were they communing or meditating? No. They were texting or — like the glassy-eyed hordes hustling along the sidewalks — barking into their cell phones to unseen ears

Full disclosure: I am techly deprived. I didn’t own a stereo till 1975, or a computer till 1985; and I own neither a digital camera nor a cell phone, nor an ipod, nor iphone. Nor have I space on MySpace or Facebook. I abhor power-point and write class stuff on the black or white board. And, except when I’m writing a book or article, I try to limit screen time to an hour a day.

But I realize that I am embedded in what PBS “Frontline” calls the “Digital Nation: Life on the virtual Frontier” (to be broadcast Tuesday, February 2 at 9 pm) and there’s not much I can do about it. But I try.

I still read books and four newspapers a day and I require students to own actual books, mark them up, and bring them to class. “Frontline” interviews a student at a leading university who says, “I never read.” My job takes me around the country talking to faculty and students at various colleges and I have a hard time finding students who can say they have read Thoreau, Dickens, or Dostoevsky, and I encounter some in class who have never read a book at all.

“Frontline’s” report is both bold and balanced. Two reporters with different points of view travel from coast to coast, talking with researchers, professors, and students, Their report gives the apostles of tech their say, yet one of the reporters, who was once an optimistic booster of a glorious digital future, has developed doubts.

As the MIT professor scans the faces of the “smartest, most wired people on the planet,” in his amphitheatre classroom, their eyes are not up on him but down on their laptops; they are not taking notes on his lecture, they are playing video games or solitaire, or checking Facebook for messages from “friends,” or emailing a buddy on the other side of the room. The students mutually understand, says one, that they can interrupt anyone at any time to take or make a call. His talk is a weird jumble of “y’know, kinda-likes, I mean, sorta y’knows.”

“Frontline” depicts a so-called “multitasking” culture where the mind may well be shrinking rather than the consciousness expanding. At Stamford University in Palo Alto a selected group of high chronic multitaskers, convinced they can do five things at once underwent testing on how quickly they could switch tasks without losing focus. Though confident they could say “connected,” the study showed they couldn’t. They could not even multitask, remember facts, or do analytical reasoning.

Most young people spend over 53 hours a week connected to their digital devices, and the phenomenon is expanding faster than the psychologists and sociologists can test the full effects; but there is evidence that it has become an addition. MRIs show that the brain on Google is twice as active as a brain reading a book; but that doesn’t mean more activity is better than less, any more than a high golf score means a better golfer. In South Korean, the most wired country in the world, millions of kids play high speed internet games all day and all night. A few have actually died after playing 50 hours or more without food or water. The Korean government has opened “Internet Rescue Camps” with 12-sept programs to treat addiction in those who have lost their childhood to the computer.

Most disturbing is the military use of high-tech video reality in their new recruiting “Army Experience Center,” where children 13 and up can play war games for free. Next to the gaming stations are life-sized simulators of Humvees and helicopters so the young can get a “real” taste of battle, get hooked, and join up.

At a Nevada Air Force base pilots in full uniform, though the ” battle” is 7500 miles away, manipulate the drones that fly over Afghanistan and pick out a building where Nevada has been told “bad guys” congregate. The drone bombs it and kills everyone inside. Even though the military say they take precautions, drones killed several hundred civilians in the first half of last year; and, as usual, the Air Force declines to tell us really how many.

Is it human progress to have 500 “friends” on Facebook whom you have never met, or to kill invisible Afghans by pushing a button in Nevada, then going home to a family dinner? Is that all there is to war?